How To Define Your Offer When You Can Do Lots Of Things
If you can do lots of things, don’t try to sell all of them. Lead with one narrow offer, or with an audit that tells you both what’s needed, and let the rest follow once you’re through the door.
Being able to do many things is a good problem. Selling many things at once is a bad one, because the prospect can’t work out what to say yes to.
What if you don’t know which thing they need?
Then say so, and sell the finding out.
A consultant I spoke to had come out of a corporate role and could help with four or five different areas. They had no idea how to package that breadth.
My advice was not to pre-package it at all. Lead with an audit: “I’ll look at these four areas. From there, I’ll make recommendations.”
You don’t know the answer yet and neither do they. That’s the whole point of the audit. It’s the entry point, and the findings decide the scope of whatever comes next.
Your discovery call does the same job on a smaller scale. It’s where you work out what the client actually needs.
Should you keep the broad positioning or narrow it?
Narrow it.
A marketing consultant on a recent call had been positioning as a full-funnel provider. In reality, eight or nine out of ten clients only ever bought the same two services.
If nearly all of your clients buy the same thing, lead with that thing.
The narrower the offer, the easier it is to start conversations. Your messaging gets clearer, your outreach gets more targeted, and people understand what you do without a diagram.
You get your foot in the door with one specific thing, deliver great work, and then say “by the way, I also do this”. Once you have three or four clients on the narrow offer, you can start mentioning the wider capabilities.
How do you make several activities feel like one business?
Make them all orbit one core topic.
When that’s true, everything feeds everything else. One asset, say a recorded interview, becomes content, builds your brand, attracts clients and gets you in front of partners. That’s an ecosystem.
When it isn’t true, you’ve got a to-do list with a logo on it.
The test is whether the next service is a natural extension of the last one. Helping a client win meetings, then coaching them on the deals those meetings create, then on closing them: that’s one lane, extended. Two unrelated services for two different audiences is two separate businesses, and you’ll feel it in your calendar. I’ve written more on that in should you offer two different services at once?
Stay in one lane and extend from there.
What needs deciding before you write any messaging?
Who it’s for and what you can actually deliver. Messaging comes last. Tools come even later.
I spoke to a small team launching a new offer where each person was testing a slightly different version of it. Nobody was wrong, exactly. They just hadn’t written down their hypotheses, so nothing they learned added up.
The order I’d work in:
- Lock in what you can deliver. Not what you could theoretically do. What you can do well now.
- Segment the accounts and the people. Be specific. A range of 50 to 1,000 employees is too broad to be an ideal client profile.
- Define your terms. If you sell to “teams”, say what a team is. A finance team of two and a finance team of twenty are different customers, and that definition feeds straight into your search filters, your list and your message.
- Work out the outcome for that exact situation. The same service becomes a different offer depending on how mature the buyer is.
- Then write the messaging.
One more thing from that call. Don’t build your targeting around something you can’t see from the outside. If you can’t reliably tell which prospects have the problem, it’s not a filter, it’s a hope.
Your target deal size helps here too. It rules out a lot of companies before you start.
What to do next
- Look back over your clients and write down what each one actually bought. If one thing dominates, that’s your lead offer.
- If nothing dominates yet, lead with an audit and let the findings scope the work.
- Write one sentence on who it’s for, specific enough to build a list from.
- Park everything else until you have three or four clients on the narrow offer.
If you’re still choosing the market itself, start with how to choose a niche for your agency. And if you’d like a second opinion on your offer, that’s what monthly mentoring is for.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I define my offer when I can help with lots of different things?
- Don't try to package all of it. Lead with one narrow offer, or with an audit that looks across everything and ends in recommendations. The findings, and the discovery call, decide the scope of the engagement.
- Should I sell a broad full-service offer or a narrow one?
- Narrow. The narrower the offer, the easier it is to start conversations, because people understand straight away what you do. If most of your clients buy the same one or two things, lead with those and mention the rest once you've delivered.
- When can I start selling my other services?
- Once you have three or four clients on the narrow offer and you've done good work for them. At that point 'by the way, I also do this' is an easy conversation. Selling everything up front makes it harder for a prospect to say yes to anything.
- What should I work out before writing my messaging?
- Who the offer is for and what you can actually deliver. The order is account, then persona, then offer, then messaging. Tools come after all of that.